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On this outing their banter seemed not so much scripted as computer-generated – steadfastly formulaic, and once or twice seriously ill-judged.Īt one point Clarkson told May that Jeremy Corbyn and Pol Pot had the “same policies”, only minutes before he pointed out that Pol Pot’s main policy was murdering a quarter of the Cambodian populace. They knew how to take things too far, and had a knack for deadpan cruelty. Whatever you think of Clarkson, Hammond and May as a treble-act, they once had a way with irreverence. Piddling peddlers … James May, Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond. As a source of visual comedy, boat mishandling seems less akin to incompetent skateboarding and more like a cavalier approach to gun safety: you feel like you shouldn’t be laughing, even if no one got hurt. They crashed into each other and to just about anything else afloat. Once they cleared the shallows, the trio devoted most of the remaining trip to demonstrations of poor seamanship. Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me. The crippling drought kept spoiling their best laid plans, as did the frequent bouts of blinding rain. Climate change exists as a production headache, or possibly just a reliable way for things to go wrong, as they must do for the formula to work.
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This appears to be the extent of Clarkson’s conversion to environmentalism – irony is retained. “Man who hosted car show for 30 years limited to seven miles per hour by global warming.” “Don’t worry, the irony is not lost on me,” said Clarkson. Even out in the middle, their three mismatched boats kept scraping the bottom, and they had to creep along. They cycled the length of the dried-up river to Tonlé Sap lake, where there was water, but not much. “There ain’t enough water in there to drown a witch,” said Clarkson, pointing to the parched river bed.
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Unfortunately their starting point had to be shifted due to a serious lack of rain. For the first episode, Clarkson and colleagues Richard Hammond and James May were given the mission to travel from Cambodia to Vietnam, not in cars but boats: a 1930s pleasure craft for May, a US army patrol boat for Clarkson, a Scarab speedboat for Hammond. This epiphany supposedly came about while making the new series of The Grand Tour, Amazon’s expensive refit of the popular BBC show Clarkson was obliged to leave a few years back after a disagreement about his dinner. Now he accepted the danger was real, because he’d seen it with his own eyes. Previously he didn’t believe in it, or he did but he was in favour of it, or something. H eadlines appeared recently suggesting that former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson had revised his views on climate change.
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